| I agree with the title and disagree with the article. I was hoping the article was going to talk about how much advice comes from survivorship bias and people's general inability to see the difference between cause and correlation of what they are recommending and true effect. On this subject, I could rant. As others have pointed, "non-obvious advice" doesn't inherently have any reason it's better. The vast majority of people I know who struggle with problems aren't struggling because they haven't been told helpful advice, it's because of some combination of lack of conviction of the advice, lack of discipline, and in some cases (as the author points out) is hard to discover how to take the advice . (While advice that lays out clear actionability is good advice, I don't think that advice that is more general is bad advice.) Take diet. I think you'd be hard pressed to find people who said salads were unhealthy. I believe most know that they would lead to less heart problems in the US, they are cheaper, and would help lose weight. The more I have gone into philosophy and that path of many successful people, most of them have taken to simplifying everything they do. It's said that only masters can truly simplify. It's the amateur who overly complicates. But I digress; I firmly believe that obvious advice is often the most useful. Personally and professionally, most of the problems with advice that arise is that it wasn't followed, not that it needed to be non-obvious. |
Eating things doesn't help you lose weight.